First--That while we ought to be, and are, concerned about the purity and efficiency of our public administrations, our vital interest is in the projects and acts of the industrial leaders who here ignore, there cajole or bully, the public administration, now use and now defy it. Second--That the new form of public corruption is an incident--melancholy, deplorable, dreadful, but still only a necessary incident--in that swift yet permanent betterment of man’s condition which practically began in the childhood of men still young. Third--That while purchasers of inequality and of privilege to extort may evade the laws of the statute books, they cannot evade that law of Democracy which compels them to assist in raising the consuming and producing capacities of the people, the standards of enlightenment, of comfort, of refinement, of civilized desire--of intelligence! The plutocrats themselves are, in the quaint irony of fate, by no means the least efficient of our manufacturers of democrats. It is not rational, it is distinctly irrational, to assert that moral or mental or physical betterment can tend to disaster, that the growth of intelligence may make men seek to tear down and tear up the fabric of civilization. It is true that the people--not here only, but throughout civilization and wherever civilization touches--are growing more restless, ever less content, ever more inquisitive, ever less reverential to tradition and authority. But are not these the very qualities which, working in the minds of the few in the past, led the human race up from the caves? Newspapers, libraries, schools do not make Huns and Vandals. On the contrary, they tame and eradicate that savagery which is the largest part of the estate we have inherited from our ancestors; on the contrary, they destroy the Huns and Vandals of inequality and privilege who would wrest from man his heritage under Intelligence and Democracy. As for our own people, whose fate has been forecast in so many jeremiads, how would any man or body of men set about subjecting millions upon millions who are not merely educated but are also _intelligent_? The world has heretofore offered no opportunity for the trial of any such experiment in enslavement. The experiment if tried must be, indeed, original in conception and in execution. Is there hazard in the prophecy that no man now on earth will live to see it tried? Is there hazard even in the prophecy that it never will be tried? To assume that such an experiment could have any measure of success is to become involved in contradictions and absurdities. Make out the perils that beset our Democratic path as formidable as you please, and still it is less contradictory and absurd to assume that we shall triumph over them.